dailies 8/24-8/30 + ANOTHER BONUS FUN TIME

so today was the first day of school! with that comes dramatically less life, so hopefully things around here won't thin out too much... i do have a slew of super-secret master's thesis things to debut, but i decided to just ultra-drag out the non-suspense i've been building for, you know, the whole summer and wait until they are all done to share with you. mostly because of the lazy factor.
one thing i am presently debating is whether or not to continue with the new(ish) non sequitur dailies, or to a) revisit the old mini hand-drawn diary thing (perhaps with a renewed sense of not-variants-on-the-same-few themes) or b) invest in a more fleshed out series of once-a-week things, like illustrating a song a week or something. thoughts? these present dailies feel sort of... question mark. anyway. this is me making the thinking face. any input you have on the matter would be greatly appreciated, mystery blog readers. do you prefer these ones? the old ones, if you have been around that long? something more substantial? TELL ME WHAT TO DO.

lastly, i am loosely obsessed with this ridiculous song "good day" by tally hall. you should go listen to it over at spin magazine's website. then you can download it from them and listen to it forever. like me.

dailies 8/17-8/23 + BONUS HOORAY

a busy busy week. at the end of my first full week of nothing but illustration, i am feeling pretty good about my progress, and about the sheer quantities of marathon tv i can churn through in the background. along with dexter, i've devoured it's always sunny in philadelphia and the oc, both of which can be hulu'ed for your viewing pleasure. any suggestions for my next conquest?

first up are the dailies, followed by a fun surprise!


at the end of my walters classes, i got a little bit of time to draw from their collection, so here's a study of thomas couture's daydream! hooray academic exercises. i forgot how much i love doing these kinds of things.

dailies 8/10-8/16.

back from a long weekend of relaxation just in time to buckle down for lots and lots and lots of work. i finished up my summer camps at the walters and have two uninterrupted weeks to, um, get it together. this is me, getting it together READYSETGO. i'll be back soon.

dailies 8/3-8/9.

back again with more dailies. and! i've been trucking along on my master's thesis (this time for real!) and i've made lots of progress this week and last, since my daily schedule has basically devolved into teaching at the walters, illustrating children's books while watching marathon stretches of dexter (a very contradictory pair), and eating sugary cereal straight from the box.

i'm keeping things under wraps for the moment (plus, i have four underway but zero fully completed), but i'm basically illustrating a children's recommended reading column/book review series. i'll be tying up the loose digital ends on pieces for the view from saturday and harriet the spy this weekend on my SHINY NEW MACBOOK PRO. the days of typing a sentence and then going and getting a snack, making a phone call, and then having the letters appear on my screen are over. his name is quincy, and he is the unofficial sponsor of this week's dailies. WAHOO.

dailies 7/27-8/2.

more dailies more dailies more dailies! i'm in the throes of a swell comics class at the walters, and am finally in knee-deep in my thesis. embarassingly late, but better than not at all, right? so, brief now, more later! lesson plans and sketches await me!

dailies 7/20-7/26.

all right, i made it. here, before our very eyes, are the dailies recording the final days of mica pre-college 2009. i have a short little break now to catch up on things and get settled into a more normal life rhythm, and starting next week, i'll be teaching summer art camp at the walters, a gig i was lucky enough to score from the ever-delightful brian ralph.

at the same time that i'm teaching kids how to draw comics in the coming weeks, i've got some major ground to cover with my thesis work. so, EXPECT MAJOR UPDATES REALLY SOON. or, in lieu of updates, some sort of murder-suicide pact with my buddy james wu who is similarly troubled in our present lack of thesis work to show. thanks, pre-college, thanks.

okay, cynicism over. STAY TUNED.

dailies 7/13-7/19.

dailies! sigh. i am only a few days away from the conclusion of the my present life-stealing job, so expect future updates for real on all sorts of fronts very soon. like, really. no joke.

in other news, i was in nyc for the day on saturday and had a delightful reunion with kit, michael, and elle, and did all sorts of frivolous shopping in an effort to dress more like a grown-up. it was partially successful, though i partially spent an unreasonable amount of money on rice pudding, as per always.

dailies 7/6-7/12.

dailies! dailies! dailies! enough said.

i also discovered another excellent daily-illustration project via the delightful piers gelly (a lovely human): post-it note stories by arthur jones are a one-sentence story with a one-post-it illustration that he uploads everyday. AND, he even illustrates others' submitted stories as well. THAT IS NEAT.

dailies 6/29-7/5.

again with the apologies for erratic posting. my life has basically been hijacked for the rest of july. try as i might to sneak away and be a real human, for all intents and purposes, i've fallen off the face of the earth. here are last week's dailies:

in other news, in an effort to strive for even a little relevance, i tweaked my blog layout. nothing major, but a slight improvement on things, i think. if you're google-readering this business, click the link and see for yourself!

there will definitely, probably, be more to show you soon. ish. maybe. i hope.

dailies 6/22-6/28.

delayed! but here they are. i am super-busy in a non-illustration capacity right now, which is making me pretty sad. so much so that i apparently did not know what day it was for half the week, realizing only on monday that i erased the 26th from the universe somehow. i'm working hard to stay on track, and ideally, i'll have some progress to report on my other studio work sometime before, you know, never. thanks for hanging in there.

dailies 6/15-6/21.

it's dailies time. but more importantly, it's sleep time. and really, dailies time was like two days ago. please bear with me during this WOW BUSY time.

dailies 6/8-6/14.

dailies week two wahoo! this will be a quick one because i am very sleepy, even though it is very early. fun fact: the last pattern-y drawing was loosely inspired by staring into the middle distance at my bookshelf, and the first hand-lettering one is me lamenting and/or punishing myself for getting my car towed. because i am a genius.

thank you ladies and gentlemen goodnight!

THE GREAT DAILIES REVIVAL 2009: june 1st-7th.

sorry for the pausity of posts lately - i have been moving to a new place, trying to settle in, and most importantly, crying myself to sleep over my lack of internet. we're trying to work out the kinks, but it's a long, boring, and very sad story that i will definitely spare you. just know it's sad.

on the plus side, the dailies are back! full disclosure: i temporarily forgot when i planned to restart these, and with the nuttiness that was the move to my shiny new (INTERNETLESS; HORRIBLE) apartment, i had to play catch-up and i actually started on june 3rd. ultra-sneaky and terrible, i know. but! they are back in full force and haven't been sidelined since, so there.


now, as far as the posting... this week's was delayed by my impromptu venture up to nyc for MoCCA yesterday. the festival was delightful, and i awkwardly stalked many lovely humans (and actually talked to a few: wahoo brian ralph, jason hoffman, and alex uyeno) and saw a solid panel discussion by seth and adrian tomine.

i must admit that my decision to attend was partially fueled by my comic-love, and partially by my desperate desire for free wi-fi on the bolt bus, i was in no position to wander around baltimore searching for free wi-fi at midnight. i'm devoted, but really? i'd die. plus, this way you get to see my rendition of the eccentric audiophile sitting across from me, emphatically air-conducting many, many symphonies all the way there.

the moral of the story is that a) i am still making things, and b) i still want to show you them, but c) i still have no internet. c) is terrible. c) ruins everything. i will defeat you, c). stay tuned, and thanks for hanging in there.

dailies week seven: adorable everything.

happy late valentine's day. this whole week of dailies was lovey-romantic everything, since after all, adorable is what i do best. gotta exploit it when i've got the chance. considering my actual valentine's day involved teaching third graders to play exquisite corpse, making pizza and watching snl, the adorable's gotta go somewhere. and here it is.

i'm finishing up the next "what if?" piece for thesis like right now (it's what delayed the posting of these dailies yesterday night, actually), so that should be up later this week. also, i'm sorting out a business card design, so i may post some of my comps for feedback (question mark? maybe? please?) a little later this week too. i'm trying to give the blog some love even when it's not a holiday.

in which alissandra is a big fat liar.

so i lied. i'm not making any promises on how long this'll last, but apparently, i'm not ready to give up just yet.

man, does that sound familiar.

in which the dailies take an indefinite hiatus.

hello, everyone. it's a bit of a melancholy day here in the studio, since my beloved dailies project, well, how to say this, um, tanked this week. i completed half the week as normal, and then, boom, catastrophe. not in the form of something dramatic, like chernobyl and the hindenberg combined, but in a quiet, sneaky way. before i knew it, my ever-growing list of things to do (like that weird fact that if the population of china marched past you in a single-file line, the line would never end due to the rate of population increase? if that's the case, china and my list have that in common) had grown out of control and my dailies were the sad casualty.

especially since this year's dailies are designed with a "be better" sort of purpose in mind, i wish i had the time to treat them that way. instead, they feel like an afterthought. so... until i get out of the "oh (expletive deleted) i'm (expletive deleted) graduating (expletive deleted) (expletive deleted)(EXPLETIVE DELETED)" woods, the dailies will have to wait quietly on my desk to be resumed. tentative plan? my birthday is in may. birthday day will be the day.

well, now that all that unpleasantness is out on the table, here's the first of my thesis pieces in the what if? series, "what if we could talk to animals?"

apparently, if she could talk to animals, she would have forest-storytime. wouldn't you? while i was thinking of these strictly as a series of adorable for kids that would allow me to work with whimsy and narrative, whitney sherman suggested they might accompany a fictitious monthly short-story installment in a kids literary magazine. I THINK THAT'S A GREAT IDEA, CRICKET/LADYBUG/SPIDER ART DIRECTORS.

i'm trying a couple new things with this series, so this one is an ink drawing with a gouache painting layered in photoshop. i'm pretty okay with the process, it's doesn't feel/look too too digital for me, almost. stay tuned to see how things progress! i should have two sketches this week, and since my dailies took a nose-dive, i think i'm going to start posting some of my sketch-phase work (pencils? color studies? something?) so as to not completely neglect the blog here. i'm working on the next one, a "what if flowers sprouted with your every step?" i'm not 100% sold on the language for the title, but you get the gist of it, like the king midas effect, but with flowers and your feet.

dailies week five: rearranging inside and outside my brain.

now, not many of you may notice (or maybe you do, i don't know how detail-oriented you are, lovely readers) that i notoriously post my dailies as close to the end of sunday or into the beginnings moments of monday on a regular basis. and then today, all of a sudden--gasp--it's 9:30! in the morning! on a sunday! and here i am.

getting acquainted with my new (and FINAL wow) semester at mica has taken a little more adjusting than usual. i'm always a little bit slow finding the right times to complete my work for my various classes, schedule my hours at work (like this delightful sunday morning desk shift at the gateway allowing for prime daily-uploading time), etc. maybe it's because of all the miscellaneous things that are super-important but not presently action-oriented but still swim around in my brain like, you know, GRADUATING and FINDING A HOME. it seems like i spend more time trying to figure out what i should be doing, rather than actually doing anything.

the only constant has been my unshakeable obsession with pale young gentlemen. they have been on constant repeat (sometimes just in my head) everywhere i go, and they have an mp3 on their website of their cover of m.i.a.'s "paper planes" that is epic. AND there are ladies in the band even though their name insists otherwise. so good so good.

dailies week four: tricked by the sun.

despite at the cold-weather imagery that has been showing up in my dailies as of late, i managed to be fooled into going out to run some errands today entirely winter-wear-less: no coat, scarf, not even any sleeves. t-shirt plus skirt = chilly (and dumb) alissandra. i think it's a flaw in my weather evaluation strategy, which basically is just me looking out the window before i leave the house. "what's that, window? the sun is shining all cheeky and warm, you say? must be delightful outside, let's go!" and that is how i end up freezing my ass off.

the primary ass-freezing errand was a three and a half hour date with a giant printer and all 365 of my 2008 dailies. that's right, the work for my upcoming show is 100% printed out.
it's official.
i ordered my postcards.
i made catering arrangements.
t-minus three weeks.
whoa.

dailies week three: back in bmore.

this week was slightly less hiccup-y than the last with the new dailies formatting. all ink is definitely the way to go, i think. next challenge: color? baby steps, friends, baby steps. click for the big version, please!

in other news, i am back in baltimore, and was greeted by gloriously freezing temperatures (unlike usual, there is zero-percent sarcasm in that statement). it's mellowed since my arrival, though i imagine the two things to be unrelated, and now it's sitting nicely in the 30s. i wax poetically about the weather here because, while i imagine arizona has many redeeeming factors, not the least of which is my family that dwells there, the fact that the sun stupidly shines every damn day is not so much one of them. the moral of the story? i'm glad to be back.

dailies week two: comment love.

here it is, the first full week. i like this new practice fine i think, but there are some tweaks in the future. likely color (thanks nancy!), maybe not so with the pencil or the toned-ish paper. any thoughts? sorry for the super-small slash sucky image, it gets better if you click it, i swear.


also, i am making a point to be better about responding to comments that you are all so lovely to leave me. i like you i really do! i'm just maybe not so great about showing it sometimes. and, along a not-so-similar vein, i caved and joined twitter today, as you can see by the mild update to the blog, the "there i am too." section, with other places to find me and my things.